looking out from down under

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few months doing marketing planning for Hiive Systems. Unfortunately, our product is targeted at the professional services sector – think consultants, creatives, advisors, and that sort of thing.

I’ve been really conscious in this marketing process NOT to just keep on doing what we’ve always been doing, so thinking about existing clients and then defining our target market based around them just isn’t good enough. I’ve been thinking through industries based on my experience and memory – almost brain-storming – but it is a pretty crap way to do things, and certainly isn’t an extensive data set.

One of the best ways to work would be to start with a big long list of industries, and then tick those sectors that look appealing for closer examination. Unfortunately, Google has completely failed me – asking for a “list of professional service industries” came up with a bunch of very poor listing websites.

Going to more official sources, the primary list I’m aware of, ANZIC, has always seemed to me to be pretty poor. There’s a special category for fur trappers, but anyone who does anything related to marketing – from consulting through to web development through and beyond to display advertising – is bundled into the same generic blob.

Today, however, I realised that the ANZSIC list was updated in 2006, to reflect the way that industries have changed and evolved since the list was last compiled in 1993. Now with a lot more detail in the service sector – the one that keeps growing in an advanced economy like Australia’s – this list is actually useful.

If you’re interested in seeing it for yourself, the ABS have a copy (publication number 1292.0) at their website. Hopefully if you’re trying to write a marketing plan, this will help you out too…

I’m writing a talk for the Enterprise conference at CeBIT, which tries to unpack what makes people spend hours and hours a week interacting with and updating Facebook, and what enterprise applications – particularly those that benefit from collaboration and which are often “higher level” tools rather than lower level tools necessary for a narrow job function – can learn from them.

I’ll be sure to share my thesis for what companies and enterprise applications can take away from Facebook – and the things they should make sure they leave behind – back here on my blog, but until then I’d really love to hear from you: what do you think makes Facebook so very compelling that keeps users “hooked” on it? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

CeBIT is happening in a month and a bit in Sydney, and this year they’ve decided to focus the eyes of the tens of thousands of show visitors on a new showcase section, called Webciety. Webciety is going to showcase a dozen of Australia’s hottest web-software companies, and if you think your company deserves to be there, you can enter a competition to win the wildcard Webciety spot.

CeBIT is Australia’s biggest technology trade show, and it is on for its 10th year in Australia this May, between the 12th and the 14th. I’ve been involved in CeBIT in Sydney for a number of years now, and I even managed to squeeze in a visit to the original big-daddy CeBIT in Hannover, Germany in 2006.

As a tradeshow, CeBIT has a pretty broad range. While checking out the latest gadgets and marvelling at the ever-increasing size of flat panels each year has been pretty impressive, I’ve sometimes felt like software – particularly the web software space where I’ve always played – is a little bit scattered and doesn’t pack the punch it should.

This year, however, things are going to be different with the Webciety showcase.

The Webciety part of the show is designed to showcase how web-based technologies, products and services play an increasingly important part in our lives. After debuting in Hannover in March this year to an incredible response from visitors, the Australian organisers have decided to make the Webciety feature a centrepiece of the Australian show.

CeBIT is a pretty incredible event, with around 35,000 people attending Sydney’s show last year. In these tougher economic times, people are hungrier to find better ways to work, and if the experience at the 2009 show in Hannover last month is a guide, there should be a large number of high quality and very interested attendees heading down to Darling Harbour in May for this year’s show.

If you’re keen to get your company and its product/service included in the showcase, the good news is that CeBIT has set aside one of the Webciety spots as a “wildcard” entry. By nominating your company, you could find yourself included in this prestigious showcase, completely free! Entries close on Wednesday the 22nd of April 2009, so get in quick!

My company, Internetrix, has been expanding into the Chinese market gradually over the last year or so. Part of this has led us to register a couple of .cn domain names.

As a result of some plans we made a year ago, we registered a .cn domain name, in this case through GoDaddy. The domain name expired at around 11am on the 5th of March, so depending on the time zone, which would be only 30 and 54 hours ago.

Unfortunately, by the time I logged onto GoDaddy to renew the domain, it was too late. While domains I have decided not to renew from back in February were there asking for me to renew them, the .cn domain wasn’t.

It looks like when domains in .cn expire, they expire almost immediately. There is no way to renew them, and getting the domain back just now – around 2 days after expiry – cost me an additional US$50 in a redemption fee on top of the registration cost.

The very helpful operator from GoDaddy also told me that if I’d waited until tomorrow to call, they wouldn’t have been able to get it back for me. This means a domain could be irretrievably lost to squatters less than 72 hours after expiry.

This might be different for different registrars, and whoever GoDaddy use is particularly fierce with their suspension, but either way, I’d strongly recommend anyone starting to dabble in the .cn namespace be very, very careful and dilligent about their renewal handling processes.

I wasn’t that surprised to read Mike’s post today about some really bad stuff happening over the last 6 months.

I didn’t know the details until I read them on TechCrunch, but I knew something was up when I messaged him to let him know I was going to be in the Valley for a couple of weeks in November. To my surprise, he told me he was going to be out of the state, at his parents place, and this was with months of advance warning. The Mike Arrington I know doesn’t make many plans that far in advance, and he’ll the first to admit that being right in the middle of Silicon Valley has as much to do with Techcrunch’s success as the many other factors. Being out of town – and the state – for months didn’t seem right.

I thought it might have been family stuff – I knew where he told me he was going to be was his parent’s place – and was hoping it wasn’t bad news or health stuff with him or his folks, and instead that he just needed to get out of the Valley to get out of the echo chamber for a while.

Of course, little did I know it was work related, and he was trying to get away from it, but instead of another Vulture piece from ValleyWag or a hatched job from the clearly jealous and much less talented writer, Betsy Schiffman, it turns out someone with a felony, and gun and an axe to grind was stalking Mike and his staff.

I’ve lived as a house-guest of Mike’s on a number of occasions, initially for 3 month stint in early 2006, when TechCrunch was less than 6 months old, and during that time I felt like I got to know the guy really well. We chatted about times before Techcrunch, women and relationships, lessons from previous business ventures and more. Those were personal conversations, and they’re going to stay that way.

My point is, however, that I got to get to know a person, a man I regard as my friend, thankfully for me at a time when he still “assumed most people were essentially good, and assumed that an individual was trustworthy until proven otherwise”. I saw someone who’d always take a contrarian position and get you to justify it. I’d watch – and cop – him taking the piss out of people, but we’d give as good as we got. I reckon he’s got more than a small potential to become an honourary Aussie: he didn’t care for status/authority, is direct, and loved to stick it to the man, which in his industry, is the incumbent media outlets. Pure Aussie in my books.

I also saw up close just some of the untrustworthy people, the types who lie even when the truth will do just as good a job, who’ve tainted his perspective. I’ve been frankly stunned that such an insightful and intelligent guy could be so trusting of people who’ve since screwed him over. And still he didn’t raise a finger in anger or retribution using his extensive online influence.

I’ve watched from afar as one storm or another has erupted online as people struggle to realise that just because its easier to click a mouse button, it doesn’t make it any less of a fight, and reflected that, with the exception of the stouch with DEMO, none of those fights were of his making. Sure, he’s no shrinking violet – he’s an attorney who loves a fight as much as the next lawyer, but more for the challenge than for the desire to stand upon the head of a lifeless opponent – but frankly, the vast, vast majority of the attacks and abuse levelled at Mike over the last couple of years have been way off base.

So, what’s the deal with these attacks? Given we’re talking about real world threats and attacks, its really worth having a look at them, and potentially shining a bit of light on the attackers. I believe they fall into one of three categories:

1. Jelousy and Self-Interest - this one is the de rigueur attack motivation for the journalists out there covering tech. Many of them represent old-media, who see the competitive pressure of TechCrunch to be more than a little intimidating. The story I read on SMH today over lunch almost made me choke: headlined “Tony Soprano of Bloggers Faces Death Threats“, and in a piece that characteristically didn’t link to its sources, feature quotes taking shots at Arrington, including the one used in the headline, from other traditional, dead-tree media, who’ve got a pretty clear self-interest in taking him down. I thought this was a bit rich given most tech stories I’ve seen in SMH Tech News lately have been rehashes of TechCrunch pieces with a 12 hour delay and no links to sources. Moving away from traditional media to the other tech bloggers, a decent amount of the attacks are motivated by jealousy. And in the cases where they’re really legitimate differences of opinion, rather than just hit jobs, things are resolved amicably, and mostly in person. I enjoyed lunch with Mike and Dave Winer not two months after this comment’s little dust up, and there were no hard feelings at all around the table in Palo Alto.
2. Bitterness of Rejection - there’s been a few recent posts about how stupid it is for startups to pin all their hopes on success, interest from VC’s and the implicit legitimacy of a positive review on Techcrunch. I can see how a want-re-preneur might get angry and upset about getting passed over, but if their key to success was a favourable Techcrunch post, I’d argue they don’t really have a business, just a fantasy of rock-star success and a Tesla in every garage. This sort of bitterness is just sour grapes (ok, enough taste metaphors already). The guy who did the spitting might have been responding to the bitterness of rejection, or he could have just be someone acting out the next point…
3. Tall Poppy Syndrome - anyone who’s spent any time with Mike knows he isn’t a geek, programmer or deep technologist. To my knowledge, he’s never pretended to be. He does business analysis of businesses that just happen to be in the tech scene. Most of the flames I see posted in comments are either from people bitter after being rejected, or just pissed off that some guy who doesn’t know Perl from Python commands so much attention in the tech world. If you’re some random hater who’s rejoycing that Arrington is ‘out’ because you don’t think he knows tech enough, my suggestion is to think about what you’re going to do when you get pink-slipped because the business bit that pays for your lifestyle doesn’t work out, and hope that XKCD remains free so you can at least have some humour.

Anyway, the key point I’m trying to make here is that Mike’s a great guy: within 10 mins of meeting me and my business partner in Palo Alto, he offered us his house for as long as we needed it. All this stuff about Tony Soprano is just plain bullshit peddled by people with their own agenda, and if we let the bitter, jealous and tall poppy types continue with their baseless tirades without any accountability, we’re going to loose more and more good people.

Lets hope the serious stuff of the stalking ends, and for personally, I hope those enjoying the specatle of watching one of their biggest competitive threats bow out (hopefully temporarily) wake up with a nasty hangover tomorrow when they realise their rehashed and late stories, with little analysis, depth, opinion and conviction, supported by a business model more conflicted that Arrington’s ever was, is crumbling around them.

I recently got a letter from a law firm in the US, alleging that my new business, Hiive Systems, has infringed their trademark. Unfortunately for them, the best they could do in claiming a trade mark was allege our logo was similar to theirs (we don’t think it is), and even though our businesses are in different industries, they demanded we stop using our name, logo and relinquish our registered domains, or they’ll sue us under some loose Common Law precedent formed in 1870 or so when the US government sued a counterfeiter.

Anyway, this is all going to play out over the next few months, so I won’t name names or go into details here lest I prejudice things or give these guys cause to make the issue (more) personal, but the upshot was that I did one of those important and non urgent things, and registered my trademark for Hiive Systems, initially in the US and Australia, and soon via the Madrid protocol.

For the benefit of those that haven’t gone through the process, but have been thinking about it, here are a couple of notes/observations. The key point is that it isn’t that expensive, and it isn’t that hard – if you’ve got a brand you care about, you really should be protecting your rights through a trade mark.

Australian Trade Marks (via ipaustralia.gov.au)

The process of applying for the trademark was fairly straight forward. The online application form was quite user friendly, and they made it easy to upload files and search for categories you want your trade mark applied to, from within the application process/form.

What surprised me the most was the vast array of detailed classifications for trademark categories: while I had previously thought the applications were for around 45 “high level” classes of registration (such as Class 9 which includes computer software), there are hundreds of sub-classes, and each one you select using a checkbox costs you more ($120 a pop). For example, “software” as a search phrase returned more than 80 sub-classes of Class 9 alone.

Starting small, we’ve spent $240AUD on an application for two categories, payable by credit card, and now we wait for the examination process to unfold. So far, pretty easy, and if/when they get accepted, we’ll be up for $250/class to actually register the marks, and then $300/class/year to maintain them: a total startup cost of $370/class.

IPAustralia is currently estimating less than a 3 month assessment period, which is nice – if I’m lucky I’ll know the result by Valentines Day.

United States Trade Marks (via www.uspto.gov)

The US Trade Mark system was decidedly less user-friendly, however, with patience and reading the fine-print, it worked out well.

Much like the Australian example, there are hundreds of sub-classes that you can apply against with your Trade Mark application, and each of these has a cost attached: US$275 per sub class, using the online TEAS-Plus system, which is a little more demanding of what you give it (and which presumably saves the examiners time). The good news is that these fees also appear to cover the actual registration if the mark is accepted, which is a good thing, since they’re a fair amount higher than the Australian application fees.

One snag I got stuck on while registering was the need to declare the reason for the registration for each class – it was important to select one box at a time, and in my case, choose 1a) since we’re already trading, and then upload some proof that we were already using the mark, in our case, a screenshot from our application. This form and button processes was very poor on user friendliness, and I had to delete and re-add records after accidentally setting them to be 1b) (not in use yet) and start over.

The email from the USPTO states that it is likely to be about 5 months until the application even gets examined, however, when it comes to challenges on validity of the trademark, they’ll use the application date as their reference point. If I’m lucky, I’ll know the result before the start of next year’s ski season.